Financial Atheism | Sovereignty Through Mathematics Chapter 2 | Bitcoin Infinity Academy #3

@npub12rv5lskct… said "get in touch with me directly if you want to work on/with #cashu". 🙋‍♂️Hi, right here! I'm respecting his "don't Nostr DM me" profile note but wasn't able to find him in my Matrix client... I want to use trusted Cashu mints as a fundamental piece of an escrow system that backs a free market of bounties and work-for-hire (over Nostr, of course) I already have a minimally-viable relay implementation and a web client that handles the happy-path actions. I've integrated zaps for escrow payments and funds dispersal. Deeply-embedding Cashu mints into the escrow system will really take this idea where it needs to go. If you're ever available to share some thoughts on the design or provide some Cashu guidance I would be deeply appreciative @npub12rv5lskct… ! You know where to find me. Thanks! (If I don't respond to a DM it means I definitely didn't see or receive it. Tag me in a note in that case!)

"Oh yea, we're going to scale [Bitcoin] without shitcoins. That's for sure.". - @npub12rv5lskct… ♥️♥️♥️

This intro from @npub12rv5lskct… about art/code/creativity.... Wow. How did we end up with this guy? What a world.

sats for holidays: back in the paper wallet days i printed some out for nieces and nephews as bitcoin stocking stuffers. since then i've swept them to hardware cold wallets, all the while sliding more sats in every year. each year i help their parents get a little closer to legit self-custody without my involvement. started with me as the custodian.. end goal being a self sovereign extended family (with a nice starter stack). bitcoin uncle club!

vinney here (the "v" in "v cavallo" 😆) i have a fully self-hosted lightning address at my own domain - [email protected] - that i achieve with lnbits on a public vps and a tunnel to an umbrel node on my LAN. it is a pain in the ass but it **does** work and makes me happy. the externally-reachable vps is the key. dm me on nostr if you want more details!

I'm not picking a side here. I just want to clarify Mechanic's point as I understand it. A scammer just needs to get Granny to double-click on an application that does those things automatically. Fetch op return data from a block on the chain, does whatever parsing and chopping, and then runs it locally on her machine (stealing her credit card number or passwords or whatever arbitrary malicious malware activity). If the scammer hosted this malware on his own server, downloads would leave a paper trail that investigators could follow. Uploading the malware to any other public server would likely be blocked or filtered by whatever security and content restrictions that plarform has. his point is the Bitcoin blockchain becomes the least filtered, easiest place to upload that sort of thing. whether one sees this as a problem or not is up for debate, but I wanted the argument to at least be clear.

you asked how the bill pay thing works for me: i get "bank account and routing numbers" from Strike, where i have a bitcoin balance and zero USD. i put that "bank" account number in my credit card, mortgage, car payment, etc. - literally everywhere. so all my USD bills are paid from my bitcoin "checking account" balance in Strike. importantly, i have an auto-withdraw threshold on Strike where anything above that amount is moved to a (new) address in my cold storage automatically. so life is like: get paid in bitcoin; "checking account" balance stays in Strike for monthly expenses; excess above that is automatically hodled in cold storage. it's actually fairly mindblowing...

This was supposed to be a much bigger boost. I mis-tapped

npub1qny3tkh0acurzla8x3zy4nhrjz5zd8l9sy9jys09umwng00manysew95gx and npub1sg6plzptd64u62a878hep2kev88swjh3tw00gjsfl8f237lmu63q0uf63m and npub1qny3tkh0acurzla8x3zy4nhrjz5zd8l9sy9jys09umwng00manysew95gx said "Twitter is a walled garden, so you can only post screenshots to Nostr". If **you** can see a tweet (or any other "private" content on the web) you can make a perfect web-archive of it. And then you can share it peer to peer in an uncensorable manner, removing all the internet's walled gardens - including paywalled ones. When someone else replays that archive in their browser, they're seeing the private page exactly as you did. The available tools for doing this are a bit clunky at the moment, but my team has built 95% of a frictionless user experience for doing just this. We'll be done with it within the year (or we'll be out of business). And Nostr provides all the rest of the infrastructure needed to make a proper network out of this. Extremely exciting!

my mempool my choice

#cashu is a genius act cashu ecash will be to megacorp coins what Bitcoin is to fiat.

I have listened to this episode on repeat back-to-back no less than 4 times over the past couple days. If you listen to one podcast in your entire life, make it this one. Thank you, @npub1zf2fsqpv7…

re bip110: best case scenario is that the forced-move game theory that Mechanic describes actually teaches node runners that they shouldn't be ambivalent, now or in Bitcoin's future, lest they get played by a motivated minority. Maybe this was always the goal...

The reason I stick with nostr is the same reason I stick with all open protocols: NO to permission and coercion; YES to voluntary cooperation. exit, opt-out, opt-in, reorganize voluntarily.

"donate to the show" okay!

let's do something about that zap amount floor.

fun song!!

here's to your hourly rate

extremely timely for me at the moment.

Important topic right now and a nice, concise definition for custody. I found myself with a few unresolved questions though. here's one: the distinction between technically-present non-custody and **effective** non-custody. The piece mentioned that a user's technical competence is _irrelevant_ to the definition of custody. "They can get a friend to help". I mostly agree, but I can imagine a situation where a user who has "technically-present non-custody" is permanently precluded from their unilateral exit because the technical knowledge, hardware required, time investment needed, etc. far outstrips their own resources and their entire social network's ability. I'm stuck on this because it doesn't break the definition of non-custody in the framework presented here, but it renders the non-custody property effectively moot. I'm happy to just accept that this is how reality works; some properties may be technically present but effectively out of reach, and that's still a better world than one where the properties don't exist at all. But I have to also acknowledge that every superstructure built to provide access to the technical property is itself a liability on the _effective_ access to the property and there is no way around this in a world of limited resources and lumpy distribution of agency/leverage. ...I thought I was going to keep this short, but I already failed at that and might as well mention another problem I had: "as long as you have all the data you need locally on your device, you have non-custody". Again I technically agree, but it introduces another point of custody: your device's custodian, if one exists. Are you using a mobile OS that has a way to censor what you're able to access on it? If so, the "local data" doesn't have perfect unilateral exit/exfiltrarion. This is a different flavor of the "superstructure of access" I mentioned above. Its tradeoffs all the way down, since the underlying property in question (UTXOs) is dependent on a comp…

I fucking love Jason Lowery. I've missed him! Glad to see him back making appearances again

i picked up a pound of cacao, thanks! I've been on the hunt for high-quality, low-garbage chocolate for a while. Nostr, Bitcoin, and the Circle P never fail to deliver high quality products! Our children's children will live forever 😆

"AOL Online" This boost is 100% because of that faux pas 😅😉

of course i'm going to spend my sats, i don't have another choice - i don't hold dollars. even when a merchant sees me using a credit card, i'm paying the usd bill with bitcoin via Strike. but for everyone else, they can use cashapp to make lightning payments from their usd balance or linked debit card! Bitcoin is the new payment rail

Amber signer on Android handles multiple npubs very nicely!

finally picked up some soap money soap - I think this "ad read" finally did it lol! @npub1zzmxvr9sw…

💪

I've never worked with or even casually bumped into (in person or online) anyone who is actually into this kind of thing. who and where are these people?! are they even real?

I haven't even listened to this yet but I'm boosting it on the title and description alone.

oh Contra's back! I thought something was missing from my podcast lineup recently. welcome back

the timing on this is fairly crazy. I've been working on (mostly in my head and on paper, no code yet) something in this neighborhood, which I'll explain in a reply...

typo in the title is fun :)

incredible episode. Am I crazy, or does BitKit NOT provide a simple Lightning wallet to USA users? I get a message about lightning services not being available in my country (with the option to do a manual integration with a lightning node). manual integration is cool, but that is not beginner-friendly

Fantastic performance, @npub1trr5r2nrp…. I'll definitely be sharing this with some skeptical progressive friends who I hope will be encouraged by the optimistic picture you paint. Ficticuous did well, but his responses didn't seem to stand up to your points in my opinion. Very glad to learn of his well thought-out stances either way, though. He has a lot more faith in social movements than I, in their effectiveness but even more so in his confidence that they end up being "good". (One of the biggest issues is how he even defines "good", and who his definition applies to, and if they want it to or not...)

"then" :)